The Most Interesting Comics of the Week

Every Wednesday, I write about the most interesting new comics hitting comic shops, bookstores, digital, Kickstarter, and the web. Feel free to comment below if there's a comic you've read recently that you want to talk about or an upcoming comic that you'd like me to consider highlighting.

Universe! #1

By Albert Monteys
The Panel Syndicate

The latest pay-what-you-wish series from The Panel Syndicate.

Last year, Bryan K. Vaughan (Saga, Y: The Last Man) and Marcos Martin (Amazing Spider-man, Daredevil) launched The Panel Syndicate, a website to distribute their creator-owned digital comic The Private Eye. Using a pay-what-you-want business model, their venture has been an enormous success, bringing in a reported six-figure profit for a comic that readers could easily download for free if they wished. Now, The Panel Syndicate is expanding into a second title and bringing in a new creator.

Albert Monteys is a cartoonist who is well known in his home country of Spain but pretty much unknown everywhere else. Asked by his friend Marcos Martin to join The Panel Syndicate, he is using it to publish an ongoing anthology of science fiction stories called Universe! The first issue, released last week, is a time-traveling romp spanning billions of years and it's about an evil corporation that sends an employee back to the Big Bang in order to brand all of life—down to its very quarks—with the company logo. Those like myself who are new to Monteys work will read this wondering how we could possibly just be seeing his spectacular work for the first time.

Each issue of Universe!, published every two months, will tell a new self-contained story, although Monteys says they will be connected in some way.

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Ody-C #1

By Matt Fraction and Christian Ward
Image Comics

A gender-bent Odyssey set in outer space.

Homer’s Odyssey, the epic adventure written somewhere around the end of the 8th century, has been the blueprint for every hero’s journey written since. In Ody-C, Matt Fraction and Christian Ward bring the classical Greek poem into the future and into outer space. It’s a new series published by Image Comics—home of Fraction’s surprise hit Sex Criminals—and with Christian Ward’s colorful, hallucinatory digitally painted art, it looks like a druggy, abstract rendition of Image’s best selling sci-fi hit Saga.

Fraction does a number of weird things with this comic, the least of which is setting it in space. It’s a gender-bent adaptation of what is a male revenge fantasy about returning to your love and butchering all the dudes that have been trying to get with her.

The heroine, Odyssia, is Odysseus by way of Barbarella and Wonder Woman. She’s the captain of an intergalactic army that has been at war for 10 years, and she longs to return, not to her man, but to the infant child she left behind. Another weird thing is that Fraction writes the book in six syllable dactylic hexameter, the rhythmic style of the classical poetry Homer used with The Odyssey. Oh, and it all starts with 8 pages that fold out into one panoramic scene. Christian Ward put in a lot of time with world building and character design to make this book look as outlandish and other-worldly as possible.

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Gotham By Midnight #1

By Ray Fawkes and Ben Templesmith
DC Comics

A Gotham City police taskforce that takes on the weird stuff Batman just can’t handle.

In the past few months, DC Comics has greatly expanded the scope of their “Bat-Family” titles which previously just consisted of multiple Batman comics and some secondary titles featuring sidekicks like Robin and Nightwing. In addition to giving Batgirl a new look and style appropriate for a millennial female audience, they launched titles like Grayson, an espionage comic featuring Dick Grayson; Gotham Academy, a supernatural comic set in a Gotham boarding school; and Arkham Manor, a book about Batman’s villains. Each book takes the world of Batman and pushes it into new genres with new storytelling opportunities.

This week brings Gotham By Midnight, a dark horror comic that, at one point in time, would have been separated from the main DC line and published within their horror-friendly Vertigo imprint.

Horror masters Ray Fawkes (Constantine) and Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night) introduce a Gotham City police task force that investigates the deeply weird goings on in Gotham that even Batman can’t deal with. The task force is led by longtime DC character Jim Corrigan (the host body for The Spectre) who leads a team of freaky specialists including Corrigan’s partner, Detective Lisa Drake, their expert on all things religious, Sister Justine, and forensics scientist Dr. Szandor Tarr. It’s kind of a B.P.R.D for the DC Universe.

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Frontier #6

By Emily Carroll
Youth in Decline

Another creepy comic—in full color print!—from Emily Carroll.

2014 has been a good year for reading Emily Carroll comics in book form. The cartoonist, who is known for pushing the medium of webcomics with her inventive, subtly animated horror comics, released her first book via a major publisher this year, Through The Woods. Now, she quickly follows it up with a short story, Ann By The Bed, published in the 6th issue of Youth in Decline’s anthology comic Frontier.

Ann By the Bed, in typical Carroll fashion, tells an eerie story about a young woman who was mysteriously murdered long ago and has become an urban legend, the stuff of parlor games that young girls play to scare themselves silly during slumber parties. To read Carroll is to witness the beginnings of one of the great careers in comics history. She is a modern day Edward Gorey in tone and subject matter and is one of the most technically proficient young cartoonists working today. It’s hard to believe that she is only just getting started.

Frontier is a great little comic that is printed using full color digital Risograph printing, which allows self-publishers to put out low cost color books with ease. Each issue showcases an up-and-coming artist and Youth in Decline has proven themselves true tastemakers with their choices so far (previously we’ve seen exciting new cartoonists like Hellen Jo and Sam Alden). You can buy a copy of Frontier #6 or any previous issue directly from the publisher.